patterns of stars on the skin
by Aiko Isari
Summary: AU. A puppy has a new playmate. A girl has only her prayers. Is that enough to obtain a miracle? Part 3 of 'our infinity'


Plotmon drinks the poison again today.

She's not a fool, much as her constant smile might appear to say. She knows the poison could kill her one day. If it's today, then it is. But not drinking it will ensure she dies today. Somehow. Death is like that.

She drinks the poison and follows all of her training laws. This is all she knows. He is all she knows. He is all she needs to think about. He is all that matters.

Until she arrives.

She is small and mostly hairless and she coughs loud enough to wake unhatched eggs.

Vamdemon makes her scream. She screams words no one understands. She screams for someone. Plotmon figures this out after listening to her repeat the word like a mantra. It must be like the alarm.

Plotmon listens. She doesn't care. After all, Plotmon is used to screaming herself. Yet she keeps listening, and wishes to herself something she doesn't understands.

After a while, the screams die down. They happen less often throughout each day.

Plotmon drinks the poison every day. The other human sometimes watches.

* * *

Hikari doesn't like her captor.

It's an odd feeling to her, to not like someone. She usually tolerates someone even when they do horrible things. Or she swallows it and hides it This man is different. This man wants her to feel pain. That's awful. The adults don't want that. They just want to make sure she and her brother are okay. This one just wants to make sure she never sees him again. And she doesn't know why. She doesn't know what she's done wrong.

Her captor barely speaks to her, strokes her cheek with gloved fingers as ghosts chain her up and make books float. It all seems so far away at times, like the nightmares of a broken apartment and a distended arm.

'Where are you?'

The screaming of her mother over the sound of her father's choking, they were drowning sounds lost in the rush of wind as Yagami Hikari experienced flying and falling for the first time in her short life.

She isn't there anymore, she knows, but it's so hard to recall that. For some reason, he keeps wanting to bring her back there.

Her brother forgot but she never did.

She never forgot the strange yellow dinosaur and the screaming bird, not the crash of lightning and fire as one tried to protect her home and the other tried to destroy it. It was imprinted in a lot of her dreams. Not all of them, of course, it had been four years. Little girls dreamed of other things like friends and flowers and games. She still dreamed of smoke and death and a dragon's solemn eyes.

She isn't afraid to think about it. Her brother has taught her not to be afraid, or at least not to show it. She thinks it's working. Her captor is never happy to see her. Though it could just be that he is always unhappy. She's never exactly sure.

There are others here, many others, many servants. The puppy sometimes wanders in to the sound of her screaming. Its eyes are dead, dead like they've been sleeping since they were born, and are only reacting because it's a bodily function.

Most of the others don't pay her much heed, except to laugh or to mutter amongst themselves. Hikari wonders what makes it all so exciting to them, but then tunes it out. She should know better. Wondering had gotten her into this mess. It had made her touch the toy on the living room table, while her brother paced back and forth waiting for the call on his scholarship. Wondering had made her jump on Agumon's back after he had set the apartment smoking.

Wondering is dangerous.

It is still better than staring at the ceiling, waiting for the pain to come.

Even that gets hard after a while. There's a stinging in her neck.

She refuses when they tell her to drink, and the poison is shoved down her throat.

* * *

Plotmon hits the bottom of the stairs again, and a Pagumon giggles from its safe place wedged between two bricks. She'll howl and break its eardrums later, she thinks, howl until its eyes bleed and it's screaming, not laughing.

She'd be a sadist if she wasn't tired.

The boy is wandering the halls again. If he paid any attention, he'd notice he was going through walls. But he doesn't and Plotmon doesn't care enough to say. She's more interested in the girl's sobbing, the sound as heartbroken as the sea hitting the cliffs and not breaking them. She listens for a while from her corner.

The master was angry today, so unhappy with something. Are those children coming? More than likely. She's heard of their exploits, the Digimon with nothing to lose after the cracks left in File, the humans desperate to return home. They were doing anything they could. They might even be killing.

She giggles shrilly at the very thought. Their master is terrified of things he can _eat_.

For some reason thinking about the refugees of File makes her head ache.

She goes to eat her meal. The girl sobs behind her, defeated once again.

* * *

Everything changes when Hikari hears the boy's name, and for the life of her, she can't understand why.

The wind picks up in the castle and he is suddenly screaming. He warps before her eyes and she shakes little in her chains. He is no longer a boy barely older than Taichi but an adult.

The puppy bursts in, so many of the soldiers at her heels. The wind picks up and up and around her, everything begins to shift. She floats into the air, everything melting around her in pink light. She floats and voices whisper in her ear.

Cure it. The disease is yours to rend.

She pulls her hands together with great effort, more bones than fingers. They claps, and the room is full of stars.

As the boy solidifies before her eyes, Hikari realizes that she is the brightest star of them all.

All stars must burn. All stars must rise up.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_ And here we have part 3! This series is weird. I love it!Please leave a review if you can!

Challenges: what-if challenge, Diversity Writing D98. write a story that starts and ends with the same letter, and Valentine's Advent day 23.


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